


Pallbearer

by seventhe



Category: Final Fantasy IV
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Old Cranky Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-24
Updated: 2011-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-15 22:23:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhe/pseuds/seventhe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now the tears are coming, as the rage washes away the walls she has in place. Rosa feels them trail down her cheeks in the morning sun and wonders if any other moment of her life will ever be this sad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pallbearer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venefica_aura (crankyoldman)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crankyoldman/gifts).



> For Cendri. Because they suck.
> 
> This is your fault, too. I like that this is my idea of a cheering-up gift.

She finds Cecil in his old room. Not the King's Chambers, not even the study he spends so much time in – the room from his Dark Knight days, where he'd spent so many hours in dark contemplation. It is a little incongruous to see him there, now, and Rosa stands in the doorway for a long moment, catching her hand at the frame. His head is bent, and she sees the edge of his face through his pale hair. She can't tell whether the glimmer she sees is tears, or if it's simply the reflection of moonlight on the beadwork he wears.

"It's true, then," she says, gently.

He must have heard her coming because he doesn't startle at all. His head sinks even lower, and she thinks she hears a bit of a sniffle. And she understands why he is here: someone might see the King crying in the King's Chamber. Here, he's just Cecil, mourning his best friend.

"I won't ask if you're sure," she says instead, and takes a step towards him. She has never doubted the voices in his head, not after years of hearing white magic's guiding whispers in her own ears. But it is Cecil's head, not hers, and she isn't Lunarian. She doesn't _truly_ know what it's like.

"Rosa." Cecil finally speaks, and her name is enough to break her heart, the way it's dripping with tears and wrenched with sorrow and Kain is laced into every word. She takes another step, and tries not to falter, because she needs to be able to do this: to do this thing for Cecil, to be strong. He can, and will, mourn enough for them both.

But then Cecil lifts his head and she sees something blazing in his eyes. It gives her pause, as she looks into her beloved's face and reads his emotions again: Cecil is _angry._

His face breaks as his eyes meet hers, and the words tumble out, and gems and tears both glisten in the tangle of hair about his face. "Rosa, I don't know if… I don't know whose voice it was, but… they knew, someone was watching, someone saw Mount Ordeals, and they just let…" It chokes in his throat and she hasn't seen Cecil this hurt-angry since the day he returned from Mysidia, darkness thick around him like a cloak, wearing all of his fears in his eyes.

"I am not sure I can climb the sacred mountain of a people who let my best friend die."

There are a million things she could say. _Kain chose this,_ , perhaps. Or, _What did you think they would do? They are Lunarian, and not like us._ Or even: _You don't know that, Cecil; they could have come across his body far too late. Be glad someone told you at all,_ because no one had whispered the truth into _her_ ears. She had learned from Cecil's sudden spasm, his pale face, the beloved name on his lips.

Instead she says, "Let me go."

His face contorts and now she takes the last step forward, to press her fingers against his lips. She looks into his eyes, reads the pain on his face. It is somehow fitting to her, to go retrieve the body of the man who loved her so much that dark magic swallowed him whole with it. She is not afraid of the Mount Ordeals. She is not half-Lunarian, either; she does not have to worry about what it might whisper to her in the dark.

Cecil says nothing. He bows his head, pressing his lips against her fingertips. The kiss is like a blessing, from Paladin to Mage, from King to Queen, from Lunarian to human. Her hand slides to his cheek, and then it is just a moment of mourning between husband and wife.

\- - -

She wraps herself in Regen and Protect and Shell until the magic whispers in her ear with every movement, like the silks of her dresses, and begins the climb. The flames at the bottom prove no threat; the heat buzzes against her skin, pricking at her defenses, looking for weaknesses. But there are none, and she passes through the curtain without incident.

The beasts of the mountain give her little trouble. Her white magic sears most of them like fire, and those who aren't affected fall quickly to her arrows. Rosa renews her protections as needed and continues on throughout the evening; darkness does not scare her, either, and some of her healing is stronger at night.

She realizes as she climbs that this mountain is suited to a White Mage – too suited, almost, because it's barely a challenge, little more than a nuisance to someone as experienced and well-trained as she. And it hits her in the chest, a little moan, like Valvalis striking all of the wind out of her, because something on this mountain killed Kain Highwind and she is floating up its slopes as if Mount Ordeals is the grandest of all jokes, as if she knows all of its deepest secrets.

Rosa stops.

She hasn't let herself mourn yet. But in the gloaming darkness, even as her skin glows with magic as if she has bathed in her defenses, it is still too dangerous to do so. She is afraid, now, suddenly, for what she's keeping behind these floodgates.

But she thinks of Cecil, the terrible sad calm in his face as he bid her farewell, before her teleport spell ripped her from Baron, and she swallows everything and continues upwards.

The night's empty. The mountain is silent beneath her feet, and the undead are few and far between. For most of the climb it is simply Rosa, and her magic, and her thoughts. It is not necessarily a pleasant journey, but she finds that as the sky lightens towards morning she has reached a grim and quiet sort of peace. It reminds her of her white magic studies, of the final resting pose in her daily meditations. The calm has settled atop her protective magics like a layer of dust, and she can feel its grave weight on her skin when she moves.

She reaches the summit just as the first bit of light creeps over the horizon and through Mount Ordeals' blanket of clouds. There is a traveler's-circle, and a bridge. Something tugs at her heart and she stops halfway over. Mist and air swirls beneath her feet as she peers at the clearing before her.

There's a body, lain out before the door of a small shrine; the building is unassuming, almost plain, but something in it __looms__ at her back-senses and her magic tingles in a strangely bright response, welcoming and defensive both. She knows it is Kain but somehow – and how did she not truly believe it until now? She has never doubted Cecil, or his instincts, and yet her heart is still denying this truth. As if it will not be true if she does not want it to be.

Then something moves, and she sees a stooped and crooked form come forth from the shrine. It glows in her sight like a ghost and Rosa takes a step forward; her foot lands on the solid ground of the shrine's clearing and clarity lights up her body, a breath of clean fresh air, the purest and most simple of Cures. The figure before her leans closer, adjusting wide glasses and blinking. She realizes it's Tellah.

It gives her pause. She hadn't known the sage well but she had recognized his hand in Cecil's travels, and she'd heard the stories from Cecil and Rydia and Edward, and she recognizes the shape she saw in a flickering second as they faced Zeromus. Why is he here? Her hand grips the railing beneath it, hard and twisting, and why is this ghost intruding on Kain's death? She isn't sure they were ever friends, either.

"Do I look that bad off?" Tellah says, grumpily. "Go ahead, child, I won't bite. I'm no zombie."

His voice is a whisper in the mist and Rosa remembers, just barely, that Tellah climbed Mount Ordeals once before as well. But as her other foot steps into the clearing it hits her finally that _Kain is dead_ and she clumsily throws herself to his side. It's hard to breathe, although there aren't any tears to choke it around, just a sinking free-wheeling sensation as if she's spinning, and she thinks she knows what it's like to be swallowed by an Eidolon as the realization sinks into her like a stone. Kain is dead. He is gone.

"I won't look if you have to cry," Tellah says.

Rosa looks up at him and the tears catch then, because he is old and worn and grizzled as if death has aged him _more,_ leaning on a staff he might have fought with once. "Why are you here?" she asks, and she doesn't mean to be so accusing but her heart feels like it's bleeding out onto the ground. _Oh, Cecil._

"Meteo." Tellah shrugs, and in the one word Rosa hears the mysteries of black magic, its consuming fires, and she remembers the day Rydia learned the spell because her eyes looked _ancient._ "It gave me a window in, you know. I tried to help him. I thought the least I could do was watch over him."

Kain's face is blank, like sleep. Almost peaceful. He doesn't look like himself and Rosa wonders whether she even remembers Kain's face beneath his helmet. He's still wearing his Dragoon armor, but his helm has been removed. His hair has been combed and braided. "You did this," she says, somewhat wildly.

"I did." It's one part boasting and three parts kind, just like the twins said Tellah was, and Tellah crouches down opposite her. He rests a ghostly hand on Kain's forehead.

"He never really understood, you see. Redemption was a word he thought he understood – like honor. He didn't realize that they're things you have to define for yourself." Tellah takes off his glasses for a second and his old face is lined with contemplation. "I misunderstood vengeance for a long time, you know. And Mount Ordeals killed me too."

Rosa looks up at him, and blinks. "Meteo," she says.

Tellah nods and puts his glasses on again. "There's darkness and then there's light. They say this mountain was meant to help you distinguish between the two. But it isn't as easy as drawing a line between black magic and white, is it?"

"I don't know." Rosa looks back down at Kain. She lets her fingers come up to touch his face. The magic in her roils and before she even knows what she's doing it pours out of the broken cracks of her heart: Life, Fulllife, Curaga, splashing against the magic in the ground and she knows it's too late, she has been a white mage all her life and death is no stranger to her fingertips but they splay against Kain's heart anyway as if she still has something to give.

The look on Tellah's face is sad and wistful when she finally stops, panting, and slumps back onto her heels. It is not the first time she has touched death but it might be the worst.

"He fought against his dark self," he says slowly, "rather than facing it. He did not want to admit it was there, and he only thought to destroy the evidence. In the end, he couldn't bear its existence, and destroyed himself."

"It is a sad day when a brave man dies," Rosa says at random. It is one of the things they said at her father's funeral.

Tellah laughs. "Brave? I guess you can tell the story that way."

"Do not mock my – brother," she says, and the rage in her voice surprises even herself. She is angry too – but not at a mystic Lunarian magic: she's angry at Kain, absolutely bloody angry as hell at his prone empty body, at the stupid pride that wouldn't ask for help, at the twisted panic that made him fight his own shadows rather than admit his wrongdoings.

"I don't," Tellah says, and simple pain is in his voice. "I would honor him too, Lady Rosa."

"You have." Now the tears are coming, as the rage washes away the walls she has in place. She feels them trail down her cheeks in the morning sun and wonders if any other moment of her life will ever be this sad. "Thank you, Sage. You have."

Tellah watches her arrange Kain's body. She spends a few minutes polishing the helm as her tears fall, and then rests it on his chest, his hands folded over it. She sets his braid over his shoulder. She pulls out his wooden dragon's-token, strung on an old piece of leather about his neck, from beneath his tunic. It was his father's, and she knows Kain would want it seen.

"Why didn't you help him?" Rosa asks finally. Her eyes are on the shrine and she knows it isn't just Tellah she's asking.

Behind her there is a long sigh. She turns, and Tellah's ghostly form flickers for a fraction of a moment into someone else, tall and draped and bearded and pale, before it becomes Tellah again. She shivers.

"He knew," Tellah says, and he hunches farther onto his staff for support. "And he chose anyway. I chose Meteo, knowing exactly what it meant. Do you blame him?"

"Yes," Rosa says, although she isn't sure what she means. "I do."

Tellah comes to stand on the other side of Kain's body. Their eyes meet, over the lifeless form of her friend, and Rosa sees ages and eternities in the reflection of his glasses.

"Don't be so hard on him," Tellah says, with the tiniest hint of a sympathetic smile. "He was hard enough on himself. And I know what that's like."

She watches the past and the future spin on his lenses for a minute, and then nods, tears suddenly in her throat again. Kain is gone: Kain, who loved her; Kain, who loved and envied Cecil. She cannot help but feel a little responsible for this, and she knows Cecil will as well, because she can feel him in her heart.

She lifts her hands, palms facing Kain. Tellah lifts his arms as well, and for one second she feels his ghost-fingers on the backs of her hands. Her magic-senses jolt with it: black magic, white magic, time magic, and something ethereal that smells like the moon. But then Tellah's spell flickers through her own fingertips and it's just float magic, the familiar touch of an old friend.

He smiles at her as the tears begin to fall again. "Allow me," he says, and she can see his eyes crinkling through the glasses. "You should save your strength, and I don't get to be useful too much anymore."

Tellah lifts his staff and touches the very tip of it to Rosa's forehead. She blinks at the bright light, and when she opens her eyes, she is standing outside of Baron Castle, tears streaking her face, with Kain Highwind's motionless and weightless body in her arms. The guards startle – but then they see her, and know her instantly. And then they see Kain.

It becomes a funeral procession. By the time Rosa reaches the throne room, three dozen men and women of the castle have fallen in behind her, marching in uneven step behind their Queen as she bears home the body of the man who loved her.

She stops. Cecil's eyes are caught between hers and Kain, the last time they will dance this dance. Rosa lets go, and Kain's body comes to rest gently in the air, waist-high. Then Cecil's arms are around her and she simply holds him, with all of the strength and magic she has left, and hopes it will be enough for them both.


End file.
